Chris Schlarb will join me in the second installment of Atlas Sets, with an initial meeting on Wednesday, March 14, 2012, at Hole Mole.

I first met Chris in 2000 when I shared a gig with his band Create! as part of an experimental music series at Sacred Grounds coffeehouse in San Pedro. Chris brought me on to jam with Scott Cornish and Andrew Pompey for his series, Notice, at Fendi’s Cafe in Long Beach. I later curated I Heart Lung in so.cal.sonic, and Chris used some of my sounds for his Twilight & Ghost Stories album on Asthmatic Kitty. I’ve followed his work closely (I curated a live performance of his soundtrack for the Nightsky videogame for the 2009 Slow Sound festival), and we’ve been friends for a while, but have never directly collaborated until now.

I’m looking forward to what I’m sure will be a wide-ranging discussion of music, practice, and inspiration.

Ted picked Euro Pane for our lunch meeting on Tuesday, February 28. GoogleMaps reveals the above image to represent the Street View of the bakery’s address. What I believe to be the actual location is several storefronts up Colorado Boulevard, on the other side of Mentor Avenue. The gap between the two locations, the virtual suggestion and the actual site, reveals a lapse in the expected preciseness of contemporary mapping software, another example of digital doubt similar to our encounters with GPS devices that tell us to turn left when there is no left.

This is probably it…

This afternoon, in my lecture on Digital Audio, I was sharing with my students the perpetual gap between the infinitely continuous analog representation of a sound and the discrete, one-snapshot-at-a-time approximation of the digital sample of that analog waveform. How the fudging of a single amplitude’s location to the nearest available digital slot represents a compromise and a subsequent introduction of noise into the original signal. We identify a point in space and time, and we map it as best we can.

So, we begin with an imprecision, some noise added to the system.

The photograph at the top of this post was taken by a Google camera car in September 2011. Has a new business taken over the vacant furniture store or travel agency? (Did Euro Pane move, or open a new outlet, like Starbucks?) Certainly the cars parked on the street are no longer there. Trees have grown and have been trimmed. Cracks deepened in the sidewalk. Asphalt worn down beneath the weight of five months of vehicle traffic.

At what point do we abandon the map and make our own way? How far can we zoom in before we lose our bearings? What potential lies in the spaces lost to the periphery of our attention? What noise there, and how to hear it?

The score Ted and I used for our 5 minute performance as part of Scratch Orchestra: Pilgrimage from Scattered Points. The notes for the score:

Coloured lines in four colours zigzag along in apparently random fashion like erratic markings on a temperature chart. Sometimes three are interwoven, sometimes two. They proceed from left to right through five systems. Sometimes a line abruptly changes colour. The following is a description of the sequence of events: Top system, line 1: green to yellow to red. 2: blue. 3: (starts two thirds along) green. Second system, 1: red. 2: blue to yellow. 3: green. third system, 1: red (ends halfway along). 2: yellow. 3: green. Fourth system, 1: (starts after an inch or so) blue. 2: yellow 3: green to red. Bottom system, 1: blue (ends a couple of inches before the end of the system). 2: (starts halfway along) green. 3: red.

Obviously we were working from a photocopy of the score as it appeared in the book, and so all color information was lost. What happens when you approach a structure with only some of the information? At what point does the score disappear and pure improvisation take over? Was the score merely a node of data to inform the context of the performance?